Welsh National Opera’s new production can’t really be said to be an opera, running as it does a gamut of styles, with Welsh hymns as cornerstones in a structure featuring jazz, popular music and doo-wop, as well as 19th-century French choral numbers. If David Hackbridge Johnson’s score sounds like an unlikely patchwork, it is; yet the whole thing manages to work well as a show, bowling along with a warm, often suitably blazing, energy.
Set in a 1950s Welsh valleys mining community where the shadow of a recent colliery disaster darkens life, the story hinges on Dafydd Pugh, a pit foreman and former choirmaster, scarred by the loss of men on his watch, many of whom were his singers. Re-forming a choir under his baton is key to rebuilding morale – “to put the male back in the male voice choir” – and their bid for new glory. Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts is a big presence in this central role, and, if he sometimes seems simply to be playing a larger-than-life version of himself – accent, big heart and voice, that’s all to the good. His co-star, soprano Rebecca Evans, barely reaches his shoulder but, in Nerys Price, creates a complete character as the choir accompanist marshalling her men. The echo of Under Milk Wood is a nice conceit: Evans’s Miss Price is a bolder version of Dylan Thomas’s love-stricken Myfanwy Price, while this Mr Pugh harbours none of the poisonous intentions of his namesake.
